Value of “Engineering” in Research

For me it is a running gag that many good CS researchers are not good programmers.

You get ahead in academic CS by writing papers and going to conferences, not by writing software. They get the software running well enough to write a paper about it, that is all they have to do.

Of course that limits them in so many ways. For one thing I’m certain that people write a paper about the performance of some algorithm that wasn’t correctly implemented and thus wasn’t the algorithm they thought they were using.